Sam Smith covered Washington under nine presidents, edited the Progressive Review for over 50 years, wrote four books, helped to start six organizations including the national Green Party, the DC Humanities Council and the DC Statehood Party, and played in jazz bands for four decades

MYTH AND THE AUDACITY OF REALITY

Living as we do in what seems at times a second Middle Ages – complete with Christian crusades against Islam – we inevitably find our struggles centered on myths rather than on facts and competing philosophies. For the past quarter century – ever since we elected the our first fully fictional president, Ronald Reagan, we have bounced from legend to legend increasingly indifferent to their effects or costs until we find ourselves today engaged in a war that we can’t afford, nobody wants and nobody knows how to end.

At first, it just seemed like another problem with Republicans, but with the rise of the Vichy Democrats under Bill Clinton, it became clear that our absorption with fantasy had become not only bipartisan but omnicultural. Neither politician nor media, intellectual nor ordinary citizen, appeared all that interested in reality any more. We had permanently entered a land of make believe. And so now we find ourselves facing an election in which no one really knows what any of the leading candidates in either party stand for or what they would do – and with not all that many seeming even to care.

It isn’t all that surprising given that America, once known for making things, has become a nation obsessed with selling them or gambling in fiscal markets on how well they will sell. From factory to TV commercial, from farm to hedge fund, from Rosie the Riveter to Willie Loman and Ken Lay, it is a new America.

It is hard for reality to hold its own in such an environment and as Americans increasingly became preoccupied with selling and speculating, our collective psyches became ever more removed from substance and our language, our minds and our souls ever more trapped in the syntax, style and morals of the pitch.

It is small wonder that our politics has followed suit. Or that the media has lost interest in lowly facts, preferring instead to deconstruct propaganda, images, semiotics and efforts to manipulate the same – becoming critics of spin rather than as narrators of reality. Or that the public has come to see politics increasingly as a religion based on faith rather than philosophy, and sustained by conviction rather than true self-interest.

The shift probably had its roots in the advent of television. Since TV had an enormous capacity to turn all of existence into a puppet show, it is not surprising that politicians – long accustomed to responding to the tension of attached strings – should be among those adapting most readily to it or that a movie star should be one of the first beneficiaries.

To be sure, there had been quasi-fictional presidents earlier such as Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John F Kennedy. But typically their myths at least revolved something as real as military heroism – Rough Riders, World War II, PT 109 – rather than being concocted of whole cloth. Of the current leaders in the 2008 campaign, only John McCain fits this earlier model. The rest are beneficiaries of heavily rewritten or suppressed history (Clinton and Giuliani) or, in Obama’s case, the audacity of using hope as a trademarked campaign gimmick. Even McCain’s reputation for common sense and moderation is completely out of sync with his voting record.

Perhaps most striking is the fact that the leading candidates in each party – Clinton and Giuiani – had close friends and major business partners who ran into serious problems with the law – the Mcdougals of Whitewater ending up in prison and Giuliani’s pal Bernie Kerick pleading guilty to accepting $165,000 worth of home renovations from a contractor who was later convicted in the case as well. This is not the normal stuff of legend for a leader of the free world.

But an actor is a person who learns someone else’s lines so convincingly that the audience thinks they are that other person. This has been, since Reagan, the primary goal of our major politicians. All of the current leading presidential candidates are pretending to be people they are not.

To be sure, after Reagan, the country did momentarily slide back into traditional ways with the inalterable George Bush the elder, but with Bill Clinton, politics as fiction became institutionalized.

Although not a professional actor, he certainly did audition for the part. It may have happened as early as his college years. Clinton, according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger Morris, worked as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically a Rhodes Scholar in England.

By the time in the 1980s that he was the young governor of an insignificant state (except for its drug trade), Clinton had already attracted campaign funding from Goldman Sachs, Payne Webber, Salomon Brothers and Merrill Lynch. He was also scoring points with the Washington establishment by cooperating with the Reagan administration’s covert Contra activities emanating from the tiny Arkansas town of Mena.

A few years later, conservative Democrats began holding strategy meetings at the home of party fund-raiser Pamela Harriman. The meetings — eventually nearly a hundred of them — were aimed at ending years of populist insurrection within the party. They were regularly moderated by Clark Clifford and Robert Strauss, the Mr. Fixits of the Democratic mainstream. Democratic donors paid $1,000 to take part in the sessions and by the time it was all over, Mrs. Harriman had raised about $12 million for her kind of Democrats. It was at these meetings that Clinton was anointed.

By the 1992 New Hampshire primary, the establishment press would be overwhelmingly in the Clinton camp. Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Republic reported he had surveyed several dozen journalists and found that all of them, had they been a New Hampshire voter, would have chosen Clinton.

In other words, Clinton didn’t really campaign for the presidency; he auditioned for it. He proved to the producers and directors that he could play the part.

This shift was in some ways even more dramatic than that which accompanied Reagan. After all, for the better part of a century, the Republicans had traditionally been mired in self-serving myths and Reagan merely took them to a new level. The Democrats and those to their left had been responsible for nearly all the political progress that America had enjoyed. With Clinton that all changed. Neither party was interested in real change any longer. The two parties now got both their money and their politics from the same sources.

And so it has been ever since. No more Jimmy Carter or Michael Dukakis to foul things up. When a wild card like Howard Dean appears, you dump him like Simon Cowell would, complaining of his poor stage presence one lone night in Iowa. If a rejected former auditioner, John Edwards, decides to go his own way, you just turn off the mikes and the lights of the campaign – aka news coverage – and reduce the election to the acceptables. A Gene McCarthy-like candidate can’t even get off the ground.

Now, instead, we are offered the choice in the GOP of competing heroes – 9/11 vs. Vietnam – and in the Democratic Party of competing sociological icons – woman vs. black. In fact, Giuliani was no hero in 9/11, John McCain has learned little from being one in Vietnam, Hillary Clinton offers nothing to the waitress or the stay-at-home grandmother raising her daughter’s kids, and Barack Obama has no plan for the millions of young blacks and latinos deserted for decades by both parties. None among them has a way out of Iraq or misbegotten empire nor a way towards economic decency and social justice. But it doesn’t matter for we are not choosing a president but selecting a myth.

This poses a problem for a journalist. Journalists are supposed to either ignore or expose myth and help the reader find the way back to reality. But once political positions have more in common with evangelical fundamentalism into which one is born again than with philosophical differences that demand logical arguments and defenses, skepticism and exposure become the political equivalent of heresy and invite excommunication.

Although I had written critically of every president since Lyndon Johnson, it wasn’t until the Clinton years that I was told – directly and by inference – that this was no longer permissible. The Clintons had helped create this climate by inventing the notion that to criticize them made you into a “hater” – sort of like a Nazi or member of the KKK. Once two friends – one of them a journalist – told me I should stop writing articles critical of the Clinton. “Even if they are true?” I asked. Yes, they replied. I knew I had entered a different time.

This tone has become increasingly familiar in some of the letters I receive. Leave Obama’s 15 unpaid parking tickets alone. Are Clinton’s anti-Jewish remarks the best you can come up with? In short: how dare you criticize people in whom we have put our faith?

The web has contributed to this aura by creating places that are more congregations than sites, internet cathedrals where people go for confirmation rather than information, and where the holy book is the game plan of one candidate or another.

To follow instead where the story leads one, to face the imperfectabilities of the world, to engage in the audacity of reality is just too uncomfortable for many these days.

For journalists, at least, it wasn’t always like that. Here, for example, is an except of HL Mencken’s coverage of the 1920 convention:

“No one but an idiot could argue seriously that either candidate is a first-rate man, or even a creditable specimen of second-rate man. Any State in the Union, at least above the Potomac, could produce a thousand men quite as good, and many States could produce a thousand a great deal better. Harding, intellectually, seems to be merely a benign blank — a decent, harmless, laborious hollow-headed mediocrity. . . Cox is quicker of wit, but a good deal less honest. He belongs to the cunning type; there is a touch of the shyster in him. His chicaneries in the matter of prohibition, both during the convention and since, show the kink in his mind. He is willing to do anything to cadge votes, and he includes in that anything the ready sacrifices of his good faith, of the national welfare, and of the hopes and confidence of those who honestly support him. Neither candidate reveals the slightest dignity of conviction. Neither cares a hoot for any discernible principle. Neither, in any intelligible sense, is a man of honor.”

One might be tempted to plagiarize some of the above to describe the leaders in the Democratic race, but it is largely myth and not morality that would prevent this. It is against the rules to even hint that there may be no good solution awaiting us, at least as far as the media is wiling to let us know. Try to think of a single contemporary establishment newspaper that would publish HL Mencken today and you can sense the problem.

It’s much like the Iraq war. No matter how bad or stupid it is, we must still support the troops by letting them get killed there another year or whatever. We are not allowed to say that the administration, the Washington establishment and the media have failed us as has happened seldom before.

The Columbia Journalism Review even ran an online piece criticizing those few publications (including the Review) that reported Obama’s unpaid parking tickets arguing, “This is a story that never should have made it beyond local Boston TV news, if that. It’s the kind of lazy, picayune nonsense that passes as a ‘character issue,’ but really adds nothing to our understanding of a candidate.”

If we can not even report that the “next JFK” had over a dozen parking tickets that he didn’t bother to pay until he was about to announce his presidential candidacy, then where do we get our clues of a candidate’s character, especially one about whom the media has told us so little?

I come from a school of journalism that said, to the contrary, that if you didn’t report the parking tickets you should turn in your press pass. What people did with the information was their business; reporting it was yours.

I also can remember a liberalism that assumed every good Democrat was fighting a two-front war: against the GOP on one hand and against the SOBs in the Democratic Party on the other. I suspect many of today’s liberal mythmakers would have wanted us to adapt to Carmine DeSapio, Richard Daley, Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the interest of beating the Republicans and maintaining party unity. But the funny thing is that the party was stronger back when it lacked such phony unity.

Fundamentalism in religion or politics comes to no good end because life always contradicts itself. How else do you explain so many Democrats voting for No Child Left Behind, the Patriot Act and the Iraq War? What fundamental beliefs led them to such absurdly contradictory positions? Just when you think you’re among the faithful, someone betrays you.

Similarly, when you walk into the voting booth, artificially implanted illusions, false faith and naive hope won’t do you any good. It is far better to take some reality along, even if you have to take a barf bag as well. To be sure, you won’t have the exhilaration of delusional faith but you will be one more voter who knows how the magic really works and when you know that, the magic will no longer fool you and yours will be one more ballot cast for the real.

In the end, no matter who are our leaders are, we, at best, come in second place next to their own interests. Knowing this and why – and not pretending otherwise – may not be the meat of myth, but it is certainly at the core of our survival.

I couldn’t agree more, Sam. It reminds me of something I read in a Robert Anton Wilson book once about how damaging it is to people’s brains when they are constantly bombarded by lies (from politicians as well as advertising). Now we see how hard it is to get back to reality.I read a post on a blog I go to fairly frequently yesterday only to learn that even so-called liberals had bought into the idea that nothing matters or means anything any more. If you want to see the minds of modern liberals and how warped they are, < HREF="http://www.thepoorman.net/2007/03/15/the-new-naderism" REL="nofollow">check it out<>.

I couldn’t agree more, Sam. It reminds me of something I read in a Robert Anton Wilson book once about how damaging it is to people’s brains when they are constantly bombarded by lies (from politicians as well as advertising). Now we see how hard it is to get back to reality.I read a post on a blog I go to fairly frequently yesterday only to learn that even so-called liberals had bought into the idea that nothing matters or means anything any more. If you want to see the minds of modern liberals and how warped they are, < HREF="http://www.thepoorman.net/2007/03/15/the-new-naderism" REL="nofollow">check it out<>.

My goodness, my goodness. Things are bleak indeed. I wonder what HL Mencken would say about our current body politic.Perhaps our only hope is Mother Nature herself. I mean, you can fool hummingbirds with saccharin water, they think it’s sweet too. But they still will drop dead of exhaustion, since it has no caloric content. So it is with our modern American culture. The imagery which passes for reality will ultimately bring about collapse. We see this happening with food already, where the nutritional payload of food is not just secondary, but actually quite unimportant.We are witnessing the devolution of society. The collapse of the great American experiment. I believe I understand the mechanism of devolution. But how does society evolve in the first place? That I truly do not understand. Somehow I have the notion that it requires real leaders. The big question is, how do such leaders come about? Sam shows how they are effectively murdered in the cradle. Is there an antidote for this poison?

My goodness, my goodness. Things are bleak indeed. I wonder what HL Mencken would say about our current body politic.Perhaps our only hope is Mother Nature herself. I mean, you can fool hummingbirds with saccharin water, they think it’s sweet too. But they still will drop dead of exhaustion, since it has no caloric content. So it is with our modern American culture. The imagery which passes for reality will ultimately bring about collapse. We see this happening with food already, where the nutritional payload of food is not just secondary, but actually quite unimportant.We are witnessing the devolution of society. The collapse of the great American experiment. I believe I understand the mechanism of devolution. But how does society evolve in the first place? That I truly do not understand. Somehow I have the notion that it requires real leaders. The big question is, how do such leaders come about? Sam shows how they are effectively murdered in the cradle. Is there an antidote for this poison?

Sam, I just read Myth and the Audacity of Reality. Twice. Lovely writing and sharp thinking… until the last two paragraphs, which largely negate the previous message. One reason we get such lousy candidates is because we believe the fatalistic gospel that we have to keep voting for career politicians. No, we don’t. We, the people, can treat public servants in the most sovereign way– we can dismiss them, if our votes count for anything at all anymore. Of course, that’s an open question. Our big elections are heavily rigged to deliver the best candidates money can buy. When the “free market” rules in politics as in economics, then why be surprised if corporations rule? This opens a big subject but I’ll cut to the chase: Form councils of workers, farmers, neighbors, and students. These are the healthy local cells of the body politic. These are republics in miniature, freely formed to pursue our own homework and hellraising. Without such councils, any partisan system whatsoever will always devolve into a job fair for millionaires. In that case, we must be resigned to vote for corporate management till kingdom come. In the spirit of facing facts, let’s admit that the ground of democracy has been blasted and wasted by the Bushes and Clintons. We will have to leach out the heavy metals and toxic waste before we can make our garden grow. Class struggle does not end simply because the ruling class gets nervous talking about it. We are going to have to reinvent democratic socialism for the United States in the twenty-first century. So let’s vote like we mean it, too. Keep up the good work. Thomas Scott Tucker, Editor of Open Letter Online (which will be published later again this spring)

Sam, I just read Myth and the Audacity of Reality. Twice. Lovely writing and sharp thinking… until the last two paragraphs, which largely negate the previous message. One reason we get such lousy candidates is because we believe the fatalistic gospel that we have to keep voting for career politicians. No, we don’t. We, the people, can treat public servants in the most sovereign way– we can dismiss them, if our votes count for anything at all anymore. Of course, that’s an open question. Our big elections are heavily rigged to deliver the best candidates money can buy. When the “free market” rules in politics as in economics, then why be surprised if corporations rule? This opens a big subject but I’ll cut to the chase: Form councils of workers, farmers, neighbors, and students. These are the healthy local cells of the body politic. These are republics in miniature, freely formed to pursue our own homework and hellraising. Without such councils, any partisan system whatsoever will always devolve into a job fair for millionaires. In that case, we must be resigned to vote for corporate management till kingdom come. In the spirit of facing facts, let’s admit that the ground of democracy has been blasted and wasted by the Bushes and Clintons. We will have to leach out the heavy metals and toxic waste before we can make our garden grow. Class struggle does not end simply because the ruling class gets nervous talking about it. We are going to have to reinvent democratic socialism for the United States in the twenty-first century. So let’s vote like we mean it, too. Keep up the good work. Thomas Scott Tucker, Editor of Open Letter Online (which will be published later again this spring)

Great word, Sam. One of the more frustrating things about speaking with people who are desperate to cling to their myths is that there are some things that one must not bring up. Example: Joe Biden touched on Obama’s appeal to white liberals — that Obama sounds like a white liberal — and immediately Biden’s chances at president (or VP) vaporized. White liberals want to maintain the pretense that they are gaga over Obama because of his … whatever it is about him. Al Gore has attained such messiah status (now that he has an Oscar on his mantle) that the discovery that he spends $30K a year on electricity for his 20 room Tennessee mansion caused a collective freak out out HuffPo and DailyKos. One HuffPo contributor offered the following defense/talking point: “He actually spends less on electricity per square foot of residence than a lot of people.” And “those Tennessee summers are awfully hot and humid.”

Great word, Sam. One of the more frustrating things about speaking with people who are desperate to cling to their myths is that there are some things that one must not bring up. Example: Joe Biden touched on Obama’s appeal to white liberals — that Obama sounds like a white liberal — and immediately Biden’s chances at president (or VP) vaporized. White liberals want to maintain the pretense that they are gaga over Obama because of his … whatever it is about him. Al Gore has attained such messiah status (now that he has an Oscar on his mantle) that the discovery that he spends $30K a year on electricity for his 20 room Tennessee mansion caused a collective freak out out HuffPo and DailyKos. One HuffPo contributor offered the following defense/talking point: “He actually spends less on electricity per square foot of residence than a lot of people.” And “those Tennessee summers are awfully hot and humid.”

There never was a golden age without veniality, Sam — even ol’ Ike had his Sherman Adams and the vicuña coat as you no doubt remember as well as I do.Has there ever really been anyone sans peur et sans reproche? I doubt it. My guess is that we simply didn’t have the communications bandwidth to hear about the clay feet with the same immediacy we do today.

There never was a golden age without veniality, Sam — even ol’ Ike had his Sherman Adams and the vicuña coat as you no doubt remember as well as I do.Has there ever really been anyone sans peur et sans reproche? I doubt it. My guess is that we simply didn’t have the communications bandwidth to hear about the clay feet with the same immediacy we do today.

world peacebefore sunset tonightbefore the first day of springplease pray for peaceharmonyand justicepray from the heartwherever you arewhoever you are withoutside in nature is preferredbut if you believe it in your heartyou can’t do it wrongsee the last paragraph at < HREF="http://bikesummer.org/CanRAND.html" REL="nofollow">this page<>right above the peace doverainbow flagand peace symbolfor a better explanationsomething wonderful is going to happenbut it may still take a little time

world peacebefore sunset tonightbefore the first day of springplease pray for peaceharmonyand justicepray from the heartwherever you arewhoever you are withoutside in nature is preferredbut if you believe it in your heartyou can’t do it wrongsee the last paragraph at < HREF="http://bikesummer.org/CanRAND.html" REL="nofollow">this page<>right above the peace doverainbow flagand peace symbolfor a better explanationsomething wonderful is going to happenbut it may still take a little time

Planet B’s rather absurd irony is that he links to his own website where Ralph Nader = “liberal” and the current bosses of the DNC and DLC are “liberals.” This only serves to underscore Sam’s theme of lies offered in lieu of factual analysis.

Planet B’s rather absurd irony is that he links to his own website where Ralph Nader = “liberal” and the current bosses of the DNC and DLC are “liberals.” This only serves to underscore Sam’s theme of lies offered in lieu of factual analysis.

Great piece…Sam, you need a megaphone, but on second thought it may not matter; most of our fellow countrymen would accuse you of the worst species of heresy…”un-americanism.” Tell the truth and they will hate you for it. But maybe repetition is the answer…it certainly seems to work for the myth makers…guess there is no simple answer for our complex problem.

Great piece…Sam, you need a megaphone, but on second thought it may not matter; most of our fellow countrymen would accuse you of the worst species of heresy…”un-americanism.” Tell the truth and they will hate you for it. But maybe repetition is the answer…it certainly seems to work for the myth makers…guess there is no simple answer for our complex problem.

Sam, excellent essay of the presidential politics. But then you perpetuate the media black-out of the one Democratic candidate of the people: Dennis Kucinich. Because Dennis doens’t pretend to be a flawless myth he is not taken seriously, when that attitude -according to your own arguments- is the very thing that should put him in the forefront of reality politics. Of all the Democratic candidtates Kucinich is the only one who has real plans in his policy portfolio, but again this is taken as a reason not to vote for him. The so-called front running candidates keep their plans very fuzzy so that they don’t become a target of criticism nit picking their ideas. Since it is easy to find points of disagreement between any two people, candidates want to keep any potential points of disagreement hidden and their platforms as vague as possible. What you see with Kucinich is a man with plans and the courage to say them instead of hiding behind the myth of the candidate who can please everybody. As the Black Commentator Magazine said, Kucinich is even looking like the real “black” candidate, not because of his skin but because of his positions.

Sam, excellent essay of the presidential politics. But then you perpetuate the media black-out of the one Democratic candidate of the people: Dennis Kucinich. Because Dennis doens’t pretend to be a flawless myth he is not taken seriously, when that attitude -according to your own arguments- is the very thing that should put him in the forefront of reality politics. Of all the Democratic candidtates Kucinich is the only one who has real plans in his policy portfolio, but again this is taken as a reason not to vote for him. The so-called front running candidates keep their plans very fuzzy so that they don’t become a target of criticism nit picking their ideas. Since it is easy to find points of disagreement between any two people, candidates want to keep any potential points of disagreement hidden and their platforms as vague as possible. What you see with Kucinich is a man with plans and the courage to say them instead of hiding behind the myth of the candidate who can please everybody. As the Black Commentator Magazine said, Kucinich is even looking like the real “black” candidate, not because of his skin but because of his positions.